If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

Research is the key to understanding the environment in which a client’s organisation is operating.  If we don’t understand the market, competitors and stakeholder interests a communications campaign will have no foundation and a limited success rate.

During my internship we received a new client; a well known hospitality school in NSW that wanted to host a careers advisor conference to increase awareness in their market.  Before we began our communications strategy we needed to have a clear understanding on the background of the organisation, their target audience and essentially what they wanted the end result to be.

First step: we began researching the client, some of the alumini and all other relevant information about them so we had a greater understanding of who they are and what they’ve done in order to communicate accurate messages about the client to stakeholders and to draft an adequate press release.

Second step: our next step was to research and gather information on all schools in NSW so we could invite them to the conference. Between two people it took over two days to compile an adequate list of over 742 middle and senior schools across the state. The purpose of this task was to calculate how many careers advisors were in NSW so we could invite them to the conference.

Third step: the next step was to comprise an email and phone pitch to our target audience. These pitches looked more like invitations to let them know about the event and to encourage that to RSVP. The email pitch gave integral information in a clear and succinct way that answered the main questions of ‘who, what, when, where, why and how’. Before we sent out an email invitation we called each school and personally invited the career advisors to the conference.

Although the task took 7 days to complete I can understand the importance of following up on people no matter how beneficial or exciting an event may be. Both email and phone pitches work hand in hand because people in general get a plethora of emails that go unchecked.  Calling over 742 schools was hard work don’t get me wrong. I can pretty much recite the whole phone pitch in my sleep but it is so important to have the bigger picture in mind when completing these kinds of tasks.  Yes they may seem extremely time consuming but the results are so rewarding. We managed to reach capacity for the conference and it was the best feeling ever!

 

Roxy.